Hello,I have your book “The Lost 10 Tribes of Israel…Found!”, and have found it to be a very helpful resource. I plan on purchasing the other titles at some point.
I have a question concerning Jesus’ spoken languages. With the amount of traveling that Jesus may have done, how many, and which languages do you believe that He would have spoken during His lifetime here in the flesh?
Curious also concerning your thoughts on how some believe that the New Testament was written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and that Messiah’s Name, and the Tetragram could only be written and spoken in Hebrew or Aramaic? If the New Testament was written in Greek do you believe Messiah’s Name was written as “Iesous”, or would it have been as “Yeshua” in Hebrew or Aramaic within the Greek text… similar to the way some of the oldest Septuagint fragments have YHWH in Paleo Hebrew characters written within the Greek text?
Thank you for your comments, and your very informative writings!
Joe
MyReply
Dear Joe,
Thanks for your positive comments and your questions.
In terms of the languages spoken by Jesus, any answer is speculative, but here is my viewpoint. Jesus/Yahshua was both fully Divine and fully human. From the merely human perspective, he would likely have been familiar with at least several languages as the region of Judea was at the nexus of three continents in a time of peace between the two great empires of that time (Rome and Parthia). This would have resulted in many people from many language groups being regularly in (or passing through) Judea and the Mideast region on matters of trade, business, diplomacy and pilgrimage. He certainly would have been regularly exposed to Latin, Greek and Aramaic/Hebrew during his first 12 years and during his final years of ministry in the Judean region. My books make the point that Jesus traveled widely during the “missing eighteen years” of life in the Bible. John 21:25 records that Jesus did far more deeds than are recorded in the Bible and Luke 2:52 adds that he “increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man” (emphasis added) after he amazed the Temple teachers with his level of wisdom at the age of 12. Yet his hometown synagogue scarcely knew him and was unaware of his wisdom when he spoke to them at age 30 (Luke 4:16-20). This strongly indicates that the wisdom and favor that Jesus exhibited after age 12 was gained and exhibited outside of Judea, not in it. The full case for his being outside Judea during these “missing years” is found in my book: Parthia, the Forgotten Ancient Superpower. If Jesus traveled widely outside of Judea for 18 years, his knowledge of other languages would have been even broader.
However, Jesus was not an ordinary human. He was the Son of God who had the Holy Spirit without measure (John 3:34). The Holy Spirit empowered the apostles to speak suddenly in many new languages as a direct “gift” in the account in Acts 2 and the Apostle Paul strongly hinted that he could speak in “tongues of men and of angels.” Such gifts would obviously be from the Holy Spirit. Since Jesus Christ had vastly more access to the Holy Spirit than any of the Apostles, Jesus could easily have had the capacity to speak any language he needed in his travels or ministry as direct gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Your question on how Jesus’ name would have been written in the early manuscripts is best answered by those who are skilled in ancient languages and have also done the appropriate research concerning ancient manuscripts. I do not speak or read ancient languages so the answer to your questions on this subject lie outside my field of research. However, since news of Jesus’ ministry and resurrection was spread abroad so widely that it soon “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6), I do not doubt that these tidings were spoken and published in the many different languages which would have been spoken in the nations, kingdoms and empires of the ancient world.
Steve
